


Kingdom Come

by hitlikehammers



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, Gen, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Missions Gone Wrong, Near Death Experiences, Reunions, Sacrifice, lots of emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-05 05:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1807219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s too late, Steve,” Bucky’s voice across the comm is flat, layered with static. “The deadlock’s irreversible. S’the only way.”</p><p>Steve knows what nearly dying feels like; knows it better than most, and this—those words, that voice, this impossible <i>burning</i> that courses through him like the serum in reverse, <i>this</i>.</p><p>This is so much worse than <i>nearly</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) for the quick beta—you're a star, lovely.

Steve Rogers knows what nearly dying feels like. He knows it better than most.

So he’s sure, he’s real sure about the fact that this isn’t half-measures, this isn’t a trial run, a part-way: this is the main event, this is the real deal, because for all the times he’s grasped at the last of the air in the world, in his lungs; for all that he’s felt the weight of the universe crushing at his ribs, round his heart; for all the force his body, _this_ body can endure in the blood that races through his veins, there are limits, there are goddamned _limits_ to what can be survived, what can be felt and known when a man makes it out the other side and this is the line that’s crossed, this is the straw and the camel and the breaking, breaking, _breaking_.

“It’s too late, Steve,” Bucky’s voice across the comm is flat, layered with static. “The deadlock’s irreversible. S’the only way.”

Steve knows what nearly dying feels like. Steve knows that, and this—those words, that voice, this impossible _burning_ that courses through him like the serum in reverse, _this_.

This is so much worse than _nearly_.

It’s not as if Steve’s blind to the risks of who they are, of what they do. It’s not that he didn’t know that rushing A.I.M.’s subterranean labs on the imminent threat of civilian-targeted bioterrorism wasn’t going to involve a gamble or two. 

Because Steve knew that. Steve knew all that like he knew the span of his arms and the swell of his lungs.

He knew that.

“They’re set to release over,” Skye breathes out across their comlink. “Jesus,” she hisses, and it settles low in Steve’s gut. “Every major metropolitan center north of the Equator.”

“They, well, they’re,” Simmons stammers. “Dr. Banner,” and Steve can see the look on Jemma’s face, can damn well visualize the particular silence from Bruce that emanates across the connection. 

“Christ,” Bruce’s voice is low, is strained, is marveling and terrified all at once. 

Steve closes his eyes and breathes; breathes.

“Weaponized Extremis,” Bruce murmurs. “It’s more unstable than I’ve ever…” and Steve wants to believe he’s heard it wrong except he hasn’t, he knows that he hasn’t. 

“It’ll be quick,” Bruce finally speaks with certainty, grim as it is. “It’ll disperse after initial exposure, but those who _do_ take it first hand,” and fuck, but Steve can make out the way Bruce’s throat works hard around the rest of it, around what comes next. 

“It’s about chaos,” Bruce exhales, defeated in a way he shouldn’t be, in a way Steve can’t stand. “Death, and chaos. I don’t know what kind of damage this strain would manage per victim,” and Bruce’s breathing, the way the inhales follow the exhales: they’re short and they’re shallow and it’s too fucking much. “The blast radius could be…” 

“The systems are already in place,” Skye’s voice comes through, stronger but without reassurance: worse, really. “The signal’s remote, it originates from this facility, I just,” Steve can hear her teeth grind, hard, as she bites out:

“I can’t hack it.”

“Unless we can get our hands on each and every one of the buried capsules within the next,” May pauses; “twelve minutes,” and she’s summing up the obvious, pushing the envelope, making this about the next move when there are _no next moves_ —

“Fall back.” 

Because that’s all Steve can think of, that’s all Steve can control just now. 

“Tony, alert the appropriate authorities, see if anything can be done to minimize casualties.”

“Already done, Cap,” Stark’s voice rings tinny through Steve’s earpiece. “The CDC’s involved, Rhodey’s on it.”

Steve breathes out, slow and heavy, and he’s good at strategy, that’s why he’s leading this op off the front lines, taking the bird’s eye view while Coulson and Fury have got the rest of the team digging for what’s left of Killian’s intel, anything they can chalk up as a lead: he breathes out fuller, deeper when he sees the heat signatures exiting the premises, counts them as they regroup, as they rally back, except—

“Captain!”

“May,” Steve answers, because this is Melinda May, this is the living legend, and that _tone_ in her voice is not _welcome_ ; “what’s—”

“Steve,” Bruce comes in, voice tight. “It’s James.” 

And that’s when it starts, really. That’s when the dying in him starts.

“He’s locked the compound down.”

“Good,” Steve says, because delusion’s an ally, delusion’s a necessity, because the way Bruce’s voice dips and sways is not _right_ , it cannot mean what it _has to mean_. “Best to keep containment on-site as best we can.”

“Cap?” and Skye’s voice is only strangled, only pinched because of the distance, because the connection is shit, that’s all, that’s _all_ : “Bucky’s locked the compound down. But he’s still inside.”

And Steve: he’s always had a tricky heart, a wild thing that never liked to listen, and the serum might have made all its bumbling irrelevant, but Steve: he’d nearly forgotten what it felt like, when the whole production got caught on itself, when the pumping and the bleeding and the force of all the need welled up too vast, too full and made him feel faint with it, made him feel small again for all that he’s ripping at the seams.

“What the hell,” Steve snarls; “Bucky!”

“Steve,” Bucky’s voice wafts through, and it does nothing but catch in the tangle at the center of Steve’s chest, all pummeled in the melee there, all knotted so it can’t ever live outside. 

“I’ve seen these systems before,” Bucky says it, plain. “There’s a way to stop it.”

Bucky says it, plain.

“Buck?”

The resignation there; the grim determination: that’s real fucking plain, too.

“It’s all very typical evil-fucker style, really,” Bucky starts mumbling, babbling, all words and words to cover the falling. “Self-destruct mechanisms, manually triggered,” he pauses, and Steve can hear the way he swallows: “Immediate detonation.” 

Bucky chokes out a laugh that’s wet; Steve chokes down a sob that’s feral.

“Cut off the head, as they say.”

“Bucky,” Steve’s voice is just this side of trembling. “Get the hell out of there.”

“Do you think if I save the world,” Bucky ignores him; Bucky asks instead, less rhetorical than hopeful, than desperate: “do you think that’ll make me even, for everything else?”

“Shut up,” Steve rasps, vicious and violent and cutting through his core and he needs a thing to hit, he needs something warm and real to take apart and watch as it crumbles because this is the end times, this is a reckoning and he’ll go down with his hands bloody, he’ll go down with his heart blown wide, god _damnit_.

He _will_.

“Just,” Steve exhales, closes his eyes until he can open them and damn well _see_ the red. “Shut the _fuck_ up and get yourself _out_ of there. Now,” Steve bites it out with all the authority he’s ever assumed, ever been given on a whim, or on a dare, or on the hope of it being worthwhile because he needs it, he needs _this_. “That’s an order.”

“It’s too late, Steve,” Bucky says simply. “The deadlock’s irreversible. S’the only way.”

“You’ve got five minutes to _make_ it reversible,” Steve demands, but it’s coming apart, it’s starting to splinter, and he’s grasping at straws. “Or else I’m sending in the Hulk.”

“These aren’t your average brick walls, Stevie,” Bucky chides, some hollow laughter in his tone that makes Steve sick in his gut. “Even Bruce ain’t gonna make a dent, at least,” Bucky breathes out slow, and Steve can see the exact shape of his mouth, the purse of his lips where the lungs empty through: “not fast enough.”

Jesus. _Jesus_.

“But, five minutes,” and Bucky’s talking again, wistful, talking, and oh god, oh god: “Five minutes could be enough.”

Oh _god_.

“We’ve danced around this enough times, I think. Screwed it up enough times that I should know exactly what needs saying, what I’ve always regretted leaving unspoken when I thought I might, when we...” 

And Bucky’s voice, wry and wrung and faint is far, so fucking _far away_ and what kind of friend, what kind of partner, what kind of _man_ is Steve Rogers that this is where they are, this is where they _always are_ and Bucky can survive torture and rewiring and a lifetime of the consequences of Steve’s own inadequacies, Steve’s own inability to protect Bucky in kind and yet here he is, James Buchanan Barnes, staring down the jaws of death for Steve one more time while Steve looks on, failing to keep up his end, fucking _failing_.

“I’m lucky, this time,” Bucky continues, voice thickening with every word, every goddamned syllable. “Fuck, but I’m lucky, because you know, now,” he huffs a bit, a laugh or a moan or a whimper, and Steve should be there to hold it, to feel it, to know it for sure and to take it in entirely, to be indecipherable from all that Bucky _is_ because that’s the only truth in this, that’s the only truth that’s never changed.

“Maybe you always did know,” Bucky muses. “But you _know_ , this time, and you’re _safe_ , and I can say what I need to without worrying about anything at all, without worrying about anyone coming after you, anyone hurtin’ you,” Bucky’s voice falters, and Steve’s breath, Steve’s heartbeat follows suit when Bucky whispers: “Don’t have to worry about me hurting you.”

Steve means to protest, to tear that notion down to its bones so he can break each of them, one by one, but he doesn’t, can’t manage: can only squeeze out a pathetic little moan because it hurts to hear it spoken, hurts to think that after everything, Bucky still can’t _see_.

“I love you, punk,” Bucky tells him in earnest, in passionate, slow-murmured wonder that Steve’s never been worthy of, not once. “You’re the best part of every world I’ve ever known and God Almighty, but I love the _hell_ out of you.”

And there’s so much love there, in that, that Steve could drown in it. 

There’s so much of a goodbye, in that, that Steve thinks it might just stop his heart right then and there.

“Bucky, I can’t,” Steve starts, fights against the way that words, all the words, any words fit wrong against his tongue because they’re not Bucky, they’re not _home_ , they are not the beginning and the end of everything he fights for and _believes_.

“I can’t do this without you.”

“‘Course you can, Steve,” Bucky scoffs, but it’s a watery sound; “you’re—”

“I don’t _want_ to,” Steve hisses through the clench of his teeth, of his chest. “I don’t want to do _any_ of this without you.”

And it’s a weighted thing; a heavy thing, and it contains all the resignation, all the well-deserved renunciation that Bucky’d always talked him out of, way back when, when Steve’s body betrayed him, dragged him closer to the dark except that now, now it’s the heart of him in every way, the soul of him that keeps him close, and he’s losing, he’s losing, and he cannot help it.

He doesn’t want to goddamned help it.

“Don’t you talk that way,” Bucky breathes out, a threat made of fear. “Don’t you ever talk that way.”

“Fuck you, James Barnes,” Steve tears out, lets the words bleed where they dislodge from the walls of his chest beneath the ribs. “You ain’t got no right.”

Steve’s gasping, panting: the air’s too thin. The end’s too near.

“I promised you, ‘til the end of the line,” Bucky finally says to him, his voice filling all the voids by only halves, beautiful and boundless but brief, emphasizing all the holes to be left, all the places that will cave until the whole gives out. 

“I got more wear out of that than I ever dreamed, Stevie, got more than I ever deserved,” Bucky continues, and if Steve’s cheeks are wet, fuck it, fuck _everything_. 

“My line was up decades ago,” Bucky confesses like a sinner, like a man meeting his maker and ready to repent for all he stole and never earned, and that’s wrong, that’s _wrong_. 

“And yet,” he picks back up; “there’s here, and there’s you,” Bucky’s breathing trips, and he exhales on a scattered wind: “Can’t outrun the devil for always.”

No, but Steve’d kill the devil with his own hands, make any deal that his soul was worth for the making to get that bastard away from Bucky, to make any of this stop spinning, stop careening out of control.

“But your line, Steve,” Bucky’s saying, Bucky’s speaking. “You got so much more to do. So much more to see, to live for—” 

“Bullshit,” Steve damn well snarls, because there are walls in him, and those walls are terrible things, they hold back terrible things, and they’re shaking like Steve’s shaking; they’re shaking because Steve’s trembling inside his very soul. “ _Bullshit_.” 

“Stevie—”

“I crashed a jet into the Arctic because that was how I avenged you,” Steve snaps, Steve bleeds into the space between them, far and near because Bucky’s tied up in him, in every breath and every cell. “I ran myself down with it because there’s a world with you in it, Buck, and then there’s just grey.”

There’s silence, and Steve closes his eyes and focuses on the knots wound up where his heart belongs for beating, and he finds where Bucky lives inside the fray, the scowl and the smile of him, all the ice and fire, oscillating and pumping life better, more _real_ than anything.

 _Anything_.

“I’m not worth that, Steve,” Bucky breathes from far, far away. “I wasn’t ever worth that.” 

“You’re worth everything,” Steve exhales, hand on his own chest as he begs it: “Don’t leave me.”

“I don’t want to,” and now Bucky’s voice is giving, Bucky’s fire is waning, Bucky’s heart is breaking and Steve can’t stand that, can’t stand hearing it like this, where he’s not there to pick up the pieces and fit them together and give them back to this man, this _man_ —

“But we can’t let this happen, Stevie,” Bucky’s pleading, reasoning. “The virus. All those people, all those good people, dead because of some crazies,” and it’s true, it’s true, except— 

“There will always be crazies,” Steve tries, but it’s hollow, too much like his chest as all the knots start to tighten, start to threaten what they hold.

“Then there will always have to be people willing to stop them,” Bucky breathes, and Steve can hear the smile through the tearing, through the tears.

“It doesn’t have to be _you_ ,” Steve begs the universe, begs God and every angel, begs Bucky, just _please_.

“This time, babe,” Bucky’s voice is barely there, now, as he takes everything, as he gives everything and the surface Steve stands upon start to give. “This time, it does.”

There’s a sob that’s bigger than Steve, that consumes him, that escapes him and starts to undo him with the way that it echoes, reverberates.

“We all got ourselves a number,” Bucky breathes it, tries to convince them both. “I’m just glad that,” Bucky pauses, and Steve can hear the pumping of his heart like a mallet, like all the things that aim to crush and destroy, and that’s accurate, that’s okay, so long as the job gets done. “Of all the times mine’s been pulled, this time, if it’s up for good?” 

And Bucky’s voice pitches lower, now, tender.

“At least I got to do it right,” he whispers. “I got to be with _you_.” 

And Bucky’s voice is that broad hand of his cupped against Steve’s cheek, all rough skin and calluses and the aching sort of love that makes the world go round when it wants to give up that ghost—Bucky’s voice is something perfect, something offered, and Steve can’t help but take it, even though he knows it won’t last.

Even though Steve knows he won’t survive the loss.

“Stevie,” Bucky starts, the sound shaky. “I—”

The comm feed cuts, and Steve stills, and sound travels too slow, too slow.

When the ground shakes, Steve can count out three full beats of his wasted, wracking heart before he hears the way the explosion screams.

“No,” Steve whispers, and he can’t feel his limbs, clutches at the display in front of him but his arms are weak, are feeble, and his sight’s all blurry, all tunneled as he crumples to the floor. “No!”

There are people, his team, and they’re filing into the bunker, now, they’re coming up behind him, but that’s a smokescreen, that’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing, that’s unspeakable, unnameable, that’s beyond him, now, because Steve can feel the fire in the marrow of his bones, Steve can feel shrapnel hollowing his arteries, Steve can feel the force of momentum and demise taking him apart, piece by piece.

Steve Rogers knows what nearly dying feels like. 

It’s not this; not this.

Not _nearly_.


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continued gratitude to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) for the beta—you're the best <3

He’s not unaccustomed to the way the world ends with a bang: he’s got enough memories, half-memories, new memories, of what it means to make the living burn.

So it’s not the explosion itself that rocks him. Bucky’s more than ready to let the fire take him down, to destroy him from the outside in.

He’s less ready for it to try and take him from the inside out.

Because when the detonation comes, the structures he stands upon, beside: the structures don’t give, barely even crack toward the crumbling. The displays within the control room he occupies flicker, shudder but don’t die, and the walls around him hold even as the flames lick at them, relentless.

 _Really_ not your average brick walls, then.

But as he watches the building come down, as he watches the alerts on the screens in front of him, all _Failed Substance Release, Failed Substance Release_ across the entire northern hemisphere; as he watches and a grin curls his lips, he doesn’t expect what comes.

Doesn’t expect one last substance release to authorize; this one far from failing.

And he knows, he’s read the reports—had a late conversation with Pepper at one of Stark’s galas, tucked into the corner of the grand hall as she told him what it felt like, how it tore at her body from every angle, every trace: Extremis.

Weaponized Extremis. 

Bucky comforts himself with the thought that millions of people will be spared this agony, the way his cells start to war through every inch of him—it’s not much comfort, and he thinks he understands, now, about the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Or maybe a scream.

_____________________________________

Steve’s not sure how long he stares, how long he breathes, how long he subsists after the heart of him gives out.

He blinks, and the world focuses for a moment. Given the looks of concern aimed at him from all sides, he thinks maybe it’s been a while.

Maybe he’s been here, sitting here as a shell, for a while.

“He did it,” Skye tells him in a rush, hushed and swift as her eyes widen when he meets her gaze, like she’s trying to get the words in before he drifts back to nothing. “Bucky. He stopped it.”

Steve doesn’t nod, doesn’t make a noise. He feels cold.

He feels very, very cold.

“Cap?” And that’s Tony, careful in a way that Tony’s never careful just behind him, to the side. “Look, I’m—”

“He deserved better.”

The words are out before Steve can stop them, and they don’t sound like they belong to him: it’s not his voice that rasps, that breaks, that makes Tony wince in his peripheral vision.

“He did,” Tony agrees, still hesitant, still careful. “He was a good man.”

“He was a better man than I’ve ever known.”

“We know.” And that’s May, that’s May telling him with steel and compassion in her eyes, that contradiction that only she can bring. “Steve, we know that.”

That contradiction that only she can bring: Coulson’s ally. Fury’s good eye.

“Do you?” Steve’s mouth’s moving again before he can stop it; the venom’s seeping out before it can burn what’s already ashes in him, what’s already rent beyond repair. “ _Did_ you know it?”

May’s expression doesn’t falter, her face doesn’t change: still compassion.

Still steel. 

“Fury sent us here, he made us come here and he told me to run ops,” Steve’s saying, and whatever logic’s left in his mind recognizes it as fragments, as the pieces of all he is scraping together and making noise, tortured, endless noise and it can’t just be him that has to hear it, he can’t survive if he has to hold the whole of it. 

He _can’t_ ; but then, he’s not sure he even wants to.

“Fury told Bucky to lead the team in,” Steve gasps out, frantic now, heart pounding, lungs burning with his eyes as he grasps for something, for anything to lash at, to latch _to_ so that he won’t split open, so that everything in his soul won’t be splayed wide, food for crows.

“He,” Steve shakes his head, screws his eyes closed. “He had to know, had to know that the tech was probably familiar to him. It’s fucking Chechnya, if _anyone_ was going to know the tech…”

Steve feels someone approaching him—maybe Tony, maybe Melinda, maybe Bruce, even, someone coming up toward his side and reaching for his shoulder but he’s too fast, too manic: he’s on his feet and pacing avoiding eye contact as his chest heaves and he bites out, broken and strangled and filled with a rage he can’t name.

“He’s not dispensable,” Steve wrenches out, deep and jagged with the way that it tears. “He’s never been fucking _dispensable_. He wasn’t, he was _never_...”

He trails off, breathless. He trails off, and he stares farther than he can know, and his chest is so hollow; his world is so fucking blank and his heart just pounds.

Just _pounds_.

“This is their fault,” Steve feels the way his blood swarms, the way his head races and spins: “They never trusted him, they never _saw_ —” 

And there is a voice in him, a logic: there is a voice that tells him he’s being unfair, unreasonable; there is a sliver of his consciousness that knows he’s coming undone, that his heart is aching in a way he can’t control, that his world’s fracturing at the edges and the middle and he needs to blame someone, blame something—he needs to lash and claw and _hurt_ because the pain in him is too overwhelming to keep contained, to hold in himself, and he’s human, he is _human_ , and he knows this. There is a voice in him that knows this.

It’s just that the hurting, the _breaking_ : it’s so much louder. It’s so much _more_.

“He was a liability to them,” Steve shakes his head, voice reed-thin and cracking. “They needed to take him out of the equation so they, this is, they—”

“Stop.”

Steve turns, and follows the eyes of those closest to him until he reaches the source of the command: Jemma.

“Stop,” she says again, and it’s steely even as it’s somehow small, and Steve can feel it: feel the way it quiets the voices, the vengeance and the reason in him: stalls their war because there’s something in that steel, in that smallness that is _him_ —that is everything he’s feeling and it’s a resonance, it’s a selfsame pitch he can’t help but heed.

“James made a choice,” she tells him, approaches as she stares at him, gives him truth and pain in the eyes she keeps fixed upon his own. “He made a choice to keep people safe. And we all knew him, we all cared for him,” and Steve’s breathing stutters, trips when she says it, when she sounds hurt for her own sake at the loss of him, at the past-tense of his _everything_. 

“But that was what defined him, Steve,” she whispers, soft and gentle, close to him now, close enough to reach. “Keeping people safe.”

Close enough to reach, and she does: settles a hand on his shoulder and Steve feels what’s left unbroken in him; what’s left starts to give way, starts to tremble as he starts to shake, because what she means, what she really means, the _real_ words: _keeping you safe_ isn’t a thing that needs to be said out loud. Steve reads it in her eyes, hears it where it echoes.

“Don’t cheapen that by trying to make this about anything else, anyone else,” she says, and it’s not quite a reprimand, not quite a plea. “He sacrificed himself because he was a good man, a selfless man.” She smiles, small and sad, and her thumb presses into him, a fixed point. 

“A better man than most,” she breathes, and Steve breathes, but it hurts.

“I know how this feels,” she murmurs, low and so deep, for all it holds, all the depths that just can’t stand. “I know you want someone to blame that isn’t him, because how can you blame him for…”

She shudders, and Steve feels something surge in him: a need to be steady, now—a need to push his own fractured soul to the side and put whatever emptiness he holds now to some use to steady her, to keep her whole because that is his job, that is his _job_ and if he failed his heart, he can’t fail his team in the same goddamned go.

He _can’t_.

“But there’s no one to blame,” Jemma tells him, eyes overbright as she reaches, brushes the line of his jaw, his cheek for an instant that speaks to some shared devastation that can’t be named. “There’s no one to blame, Steve, and it is okay to hurt without there being anyone to blame save your own heart.”

She bites her lip, and he watches her as she seems to dither, seems to sway before she straightens her shoulders and takes on more weight from the world than Steve thinks he can fathom, than Steve knows he’d be able to stand, in her place, and she reaches, reaches: she settles a palm against his chest and looks at him with all the hurt he feels living there, beneath the surface—all the pain that’s already festering, already turning his insides heavy, black.

“Just,” her voice breaks, and she clears her throat, breathes in deep before she carries on. “Just don’t blame your heart, Steve. Let it hurt, but don’t blame it, not for this, okay?” She smiles again, that small thing, that aching thing, and Steve knows her mind is far away, focused on a hospital bed and a body that’s broken, that barely breathes on its own. 

“That’ll hurt more, in the end,” she whispers to him, her eyes fixed beyond his face. “Trust me.”

She steps back, and Steve fills his lungs to the brink and lets the air out, slow. Slow.

Very slow.

“I followed orders,” he murmurs, eyes fixed to the ground as his pulse radiates outward through his limbs. “I followed orders when I should have been there with him. Every time, every time, I—”

And he doesn’t expect it, when his voice gives out and he chokes around the tightness in his throat; he doesn’t expect it.

He should have.

“I follow orders, and I lose him. What does that make me?”

Steve looks up, and if his eyes don’t meet Jemma’s, or Bruce’s, or any other eyes, it’s alright, because he’s not asking them.

“I love him more than I, more than,” Steve swallows once, swallow twice, but the pressure in his blood, in his bones doesn’t shift, and he deserves that, he thinks: he’s earned that weight. “But then I,” Steve shakes his head, and screws his eyes against the way they choose to burn. “What does that _make_ me?”

Steve doesn’t know. Steve doesn’t fucking _know_.

“I didn’t even say it,” Steve breathes before he can stop it, his tongue thick and his chest sore. “I didn’t have time, he was, it was—”

“He knew,” Jemma’s voice says, soft still, but sure.

“Of course he knew.” And it’s Tony, now: subdued but with the kind of stability, the kind of assurance Steve expects from him—a constant, and that makes his heart twist a little, makes him feel the sting in his eyes all the more. 

“We _all_ knew.” Bruce nods as he says it, states it like a scientific fact, and maybe it was, maybe Steve can have that much, can hold on to that, at least.

“We all _know_ ,” Melinda says pointedly, and Steve wants to thank her, wants to give way and fall to pieces then and there, but he can’t.

He can’t, so he breathes. Breathes, and slips into the guise of command that holds its own stability, steadies him by virtue of the post.

“Tony,” Steve says, and damn if it’s not almost-composed, if it doesn’t come out, clean and clear and focused on a point. “Check in with Rhodey. Confirm that the Extremis release was stopped in time in all locations. And if we can get in touch with Nat and Sam, we need to get a jump on dismantling the dispersal mechanisms and quarantining the substance itself.”

“On it,” May nods, and gathers near Skye to establish secure comms while Tony goes through JARVIS to contact Colonel Rhodes.

And Steve breathes; he breathes.

But he’s not sure how much longer that’s going to suffice.

_____________________________________

So: bangs, whimpers, screams.

Turns out once the black starts to ebb from his vision, the world doesn’t end in any of them.

Well, damn.

Bucky stares at his hands, focuses on the flesh at his right that had been fucking well _glowing_ before and watches, waits.

Just the pink flesh, just the white scars he’s always had.

He breathes, and waits for the searing.

No burning, though. Just air in, air out.

He blinks, and he stills, and he closes his eyes and focuses on the rhythms of his own being, the beating of his own heart, and it’s all as it should be, as it always has been, and maybe he caught a lucky break, here. Or maybe superserums are gentlemen-like.

Maybe the virus knew his DNA had already been spoken for; maybe Extremis knew he was already taken.

Bucky stretches, flexes at the joints and starts to assess his position, starts to figure his best way out through the rubble that’s amassed outside the blast doors.

And that’s when he hears it: muffled. Faint.

 _“—e did it. Buck—”_ Bucky screws up his face, concentrates on the sound, on pinpointing its origin. _“—stopped it.”_

He’s straining to pick up the voices that trail, the ambient sounds that stream through the silence—silence, at least, save for the still-falling debris beyond the walls around him; he’s straining, but then there are words, and that _voice_.

Bucky would know that voice anywhere.

_“He was a better man than I’ve ever known.”_

Bucky’s chest twists viciously, and when his eyes land on his comm earpiece, knocked to the floor in the battle for his genetic makeup, he lunges for it, gasps as he settles it in place.

“Steve,” he says, taps at the insert as his heart pounds, real fucking _hard_. “Stevie!”

He waits. No reply.

“Fuck.” He scowls at the way the voices continue—clear, now, for their words and their feeling alike—without acknowledging his outburst: his mic must have been damaged in the tussle. 

Goddamnit. 

And it never fails to strike him as just this side of miraculous, the way that Steve’s voice, the tones and the inflections and the way it can strain around a feeling; it never fails to strike Bucky as the most impossible thing that he can still pick them out and know their meanings, weigh their significance like the heart in his chest: a heart that’s racing faster, harder with each strangled sound, each just-shy-of-trembling syllable that slips from Steve’s lips—those _lips_ —and filters far, so fucking far away to Bucky’s ears.

 _“I love him more than I, more than,”_ and Bucky’s chest seizes up because those are words that still astound him, still amaze him as ones he could never have hoped to find, never have hope to hear from that mouth; those are words that should never sound as broken and tired and jagged as they do just now. 

_“But then I,”_ and Bucky aches, he _aches_ in every inch of him, every cell, down to the metal fingertips he’s digging into his steely left palm: he aches to reach out to Steve, to tell him it’s okay, to be there, right there, and hold that face between both hands before he kisses it senseless and fuck, but he’s not worth this, Bucky’s not worth the kind of heartbreak that seeps through the comm in his tone, in the cadence of his words when Steve says, when he asks, when he comes apart and begs: 

_“What does that make me?”_

And damn it _all_ if the pump of the heart in Bucky’s chest doesn’t nearly rip him apart at that, at the sound of Steve, so lost and so anguished and he isn’t there, Bucky isn’t _there_ to say the words back, to say that it makes Steve human, it makes him the best human, the best soul this world— _any_ world—has ever fucking seen. It makes him everything that means anything, it makes him a heart and a need and the air in Bucky’s goddamned lungs and he is the only thing that keeps Bucky from slipping, from throwing in the towel and watching the world burn, because Steve is his whole fucking _world_ and he always has been and Bucky’s a broken sonuvabitch, now, but that’s always been true, and Steve has _always_ been the only thing worth breathing for.

Jesus fucking _Christ_.

 _“I didn’t even say it,”_ Steve’s voice comes through, and it’s a visceral, physical pain in Bucky’s chest, the way the sob stands in Steve’s throat, untamed, and Bucky can hear, he can _hear_ it: _“I didn’t have time, he was, it was...”_

Bucky’s blinking, now; blinking through the way his eyes cloud, mist—blinking at the way the whole of the perimeter surrounding him is supporting precariously-toppled debris: there’s no out that’s better than another, there’s no out that won’t try to crush him in the process, and probably succeed.

 _“He knew, of course he knew,”_ a soft voice trails through, and he hears Steve’s shuddering intake of breath, and goddamnit _all_ : _“We all knew.”_

And this thing between them, this living, gasping, _thrumming_ thing between them that makes his blood sing: this thing is what proves to Bucky that he’s human, too—that he feels and hurts and wants and needs like anyone else, that despite what’s been suffered, what’s been done, he still drips red out from severed veins and he still sleeps best curled up on Steve’s chest; this thing’s always felt like a boon meant for someone else, because as much as he wanted it, as much as every part of him trembled to the very frequency of _Steve, Steve, Steve_, he’d never earned it, never deserved something as precious, someone as unwavering and unbreakable as Steve.

And for all that Bucky loves Steve, for all that Bucky defines the very idea of love by the way his heart leaps and his body fucking _hums_ in the man’s presence, he’s always been sure that one day he’ll wake from the dream of it, he’ll wake and no matter what nightmares have been woven into his fantasy, it will fall into something even more bleak because he’ll lose Steve not to the throes of life and death, not to the vicissitudes of fate, but because Steve will come to realize that Bucky’s all rough edges that cut when they catch on skin, on muscle, on bone: Bucky draws blood, and he’ll never be whole, and Steve deserves better.

But Bucky belongs, heart and soul, to that stupid punk, and listening to Steve breathe out that kind of heartbreak because of _him_ is not a thing he can stand for, not a thing he can abide.

So he throws the whole of his weight into the nearest wall with the crack down the middle, the give already started—he hurls himself straight between the studs, into the weakest point: he throws his strength, and all the force he can place behind the arm on his left and he prays, goddamned _prays_ that something will open, that something will give; and when it does, he prays that he’s fast enough to outrun, strong enough to outlast the way that what’s left of this hellhole will surely cave in upon him, as soon as he breaks through.

He prays, because Steve is on the other side. His Steve.

And if Steve’s got enough stupid in him to love that hard, that blindly: to meet Bucky halfway and collide with the force that might break them both just as soon as it’ll fill the cracks in Bucky’s being and make him whole by virtue of momentum, by virtue of _Steve, Steve, Steve_, well.

Bucky’s going to grab at that boon and say fuck whoever else earned it: it’s _his_.

_____________________________________

Steve’s waiting for a status update from Coulson; Steve’s staring into oblivion and wishing really damned hard that he could rot there, dissolve there, lost inside the ether where no feeling could survive: Steve is waiting—his pulse is sluggish, his lungs too tight, weighed too far down when the scream breaks through the haze of it, the shrill pitch of the voice through the bunker.

“ _Steve_!”

Steve blinks; is on his feet before he can think, and his legs are carrying him forward, to the source, and they quicken their pace when he hears the frantic footsteps growing louder, growing closer, and his mind runs scenarios, worst-cases to come as he bites out:

“Simmons, what—”

And he can’t even process, can’t even parse the blur that races toward him, that wraps hot and gasping and solid and so fucking _close_ around his body, and the fit of this entity in his arms, in his own arms that come up and grasp it back just as fierce, like a skin against his skin or the blood he cannot lose: but the scent of this spectre, the way that it breathes: impossible.

 _Impossible_.

That’s a grasp tightening near the line of his spine, toward the small of his back, though, and it’s rigid and cool and Steve’s listened to the way these lungs draw in air—has listened and tried to match it, tried to grant the frantic begging from the man in his arms to hold on, to hold on, to _fight_ ; this _impossible man_ —and Steve’s heart is a mallet, is a drum and a jackhammer and hummingbird wings and he can’t stop it, he can’t stop it when the force of it, the feel of it falls down from his eyes, catching sharp in his throat as he rasps out, tattered and faint and so fucking full of need Steve might die, here and now as he whispers with _everything_ :

“Buck?”

“I’m here, punk,” Bucky— _Bucky_ —breathes, warm against the skin of Steve’s neck and it’s only when Bucky’s hold upon him tightens beyond all reason, beyond what should be possible: it’s only then that Steve realizes he’s shaking, realizes that his lungs are heaving and his cheeks are damp.

“Come on, it’s alright,” Bucky whispers, pressing them together chest to chest, and Steve thinks this must be how it feels to be reborn, how it feels to see new life, because Bucky’s heartbeat is a thing he can feel in the tiny spacing between his own as it pounds, and it’s real, and they’re real, and Bucky’s still with him, still breathing, still…

“Shh,” Bucky exhales, and his hands are cupped around Steve’s jaw, and his eyes are so blue, so blue and they hold the sorts of things that Steve only dreams of, that Steve catches there sometimes like a trick of the light and promises himself that if they’re just figments it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because Bucky is all that he knows and he _needs_ , dear _god_ —

“I’m here,” Bucky’s eyes are so damned blue, and they don’t leave Steve’s as he leans in, as Bucky’s thumbs take Steve’s pulse at either side of the neck, hold the pump of his blood and anchor there, unwavering, and it’s no trick of the light, the way Steve’s being looked at, the way Steve’s being loved from every angle he knows and so many he could never have imagined, and his heart is full and it moves unwieldy for it: heavy and swift and faint in his chest but with so much _soul_ that Steve could live on that alone if the pounding itself stopped, if the muscle gave way, and it might just, it might do just that because when Bucky leans in and covers Steve’s mouth with his own and damn well kisses all the untold words into Steve’s very skin, and Steve’s never felt more unmatched to a task, to the necessity of taking all of this in and living in its light when just moments before, he’d watched the darkness and begged it to pull him under.

Steve is unmatched to the task until Bucky’s hand, cool and careful, curls against his own and lifts Steve’s palm to splay between them, wide against the rise and fall of their breaths as Bucky sucks at Steve’s lips, as Bucky traces Steve’s teeth and teases his tongue and Steve gives, just gives because all that he has, all that he is, has worth for Bucky, through Bucky.

His Bucky, breathing hard against him.

 _Breathing_.

“How?” he chokes and his hand stays pressed to Bucky’s chest as he gasps, as Bucky’s heart keeps singing to him and Steve tries not to tremble for the way it makes him feel so goddamned alive; the way that Bucky’s beating heart makes him feel like _alive_ isn’t a curse but a privilege, a fucking boon to be held close and never forsaken.

And Bucky: Buck could always read him, always knew just what he needed, what his words couldn’t make any sense out of, so when Bucky’s right hand settles, fingers slotted between Steve’s own as he presses Steve’s touch all the closer to the rhythm housed below the skin; when Bucky places the cool metal of his left hand against Steve’s cheek and uses the slanted curl of his thumb to dry Steve’s tears, to cool the heat beneath his touch, Bucky’s own eyes shine at him as his lips quirk at the corners, and he strokes Steve’s cheek back and forth like he’s precious, like it’s Steve who’s the marvel, who’s the sun in the goddamned sky.

It’s the other way around, though. It’s always been the other way ‘round entirely.

“Typical evil-fucker style, like I said,” Bucky murmurs, and Steve’s eyes slide closed, his lungs rebelling as something like pure feeling clawed out raw tries to wrestle its way out and it nearly succeeds as he shudders, would have managed it if not for the way Bucky traces the lines of his cheeks, his jaw, like glass, like blessing writ in flesh and Steve would sell his soul for a way to make Bucky see who the luckier one between them really is; Steve would sell his soul, if his soul wasn’t so tied up in Bucky that he doesn’t think he can call it just his own, anymore.

If there’d ever been a time that he could. 

“The control room was locked down but fortified,” Bucky continues, explains; “the blast didn’t touch it.” His grin turns a bit sour, and Steve wraps his free hand around Bucky’s waist just a little tighter, brings him just a little more undeniably _near_.

“Didn’t touch the failsafe Extremis release, either, though,” Bucky smirks, rueful as he shrugs, as Steve’s heart gets cut from its strings and starts a freefall toward the floor. “I guess no one cuts off the head and makes it out unscathed.”  
Bucky barely gets the words out before Steve’s running frantic hands up and down his limbs, his torso, cradled around the base of his skull checking for any indication, any sign that Bucky’s anything but _whole_.

“M’fine, Steve, Jesus,” Bucky soothes more than he chides, stilling Steve’s touch against his hips and leaning in, bringing their foreheads together and sharing the air that lives in between. “S’far as I can tell, it hit, and it was nasty, I won’t lie, but it didn’t take,” Bucky laughs, small and light but half-fractured against Steve’s upper lip.

“Think my DNA’s probably only cleared for one total mindfuck per lifetime,” Bucky snarks; “wouldn’t stand to take another.” 

And Steve wants to give in to that normalcy—Bucky being flippant and cocky and _Bucky_ , through and through—but he can’t, not yet. 

“I lost you,” Steve whispers, and it catches in the stretch of space between their lips, thick with all the hurting, all the mourning, all the fear. “I thought I lost you.”

“I know,” Bucky breathes it back, smoothes his thumbs again down either side of Steve’s face. “I know, I heard,” Bucky cocks his head, and when Steve sees the comm in his ear he flushes, just a little, even as Bucky traces swifter patterns, surer marks against the skin as it burns. “I’m _sorry_ , Stevie.”

“There,” Steve tries, and his voice is hoarse, pitched low because these are words that need saying, that are festering in him so fast and so fierce that he might go down with them if they don’t come _out_ but they’re for Bucky, only Bucky: the truth belong between them, and them alone.

“I didn’t have a plane,” Steve confesses, and the pieces break across Bucky’s face, realization and devastation and so much heartache it cuts through Steve’s own chest before he finishes, before he twists the knife between them: “I didn’t have the ice to make it stop.”

And Bucky understands it. Bucky understands what’s said, what’s meant, and when he pulls Steve into him and hisses with violent conviction to the softness below Steve’s ear—“Never, Stevie, you can’t, not _ever_ ”—Steve can’t help but shake in Bucky’s hold, because there was no plane, there was no ice, and there was dying twofold between them until there wasn’t, and Steve believed in God, once.

Steve believed, and maybe this is the thing they called a miracle. 

So he doesn’t answer, doesn’t promise, because it’s not a secret that the serum did anything beyond teaching his heart to pump, did nothing to show it how to harden, and he’s vulnerable, he’s compromised in this, with this, and he is not ashamed, he does not regret.  
So as Bucky stares at him, wide-eyed and terrified and waiting for a reassurance that Steve can’t ever give him, Steve just wraps his arms around him and kisses him for all he’s worth and hopes, _prays_ that miracles come in pairs, that the words he needs and the love he knows will make themselves plain between their lips, between the air they breathe into each other.

They’re both gasping when the pointed tone of an elevated voice drives them apart; their hands, though.

Their hands are still entwined, pressed between two chests.

“It’s just the damnedest thing, Director,” Tony’s speaking through his uplink via JARVIS as he eyes Steve and Bucky with an exasperated fondness that makes Steve glad he’s grown to call the man a friend. “But the Captain is indeed indisposed.”

Steve lets his eyes trail to Bucky’s, and something warm blossoms in him, taking over the cold still lingering in his veins as Bucky’s eyes lose their anxiety around the edges as he puts the argument about self-preservation and risk and loss that they’ll inevitably have again, and again, and again—the warmth builds as that falls to the sides and Bucky’s eyes start to sparkle with a joy that’s reflected in Steve’s peripheral vision as Bruce bites his lip against a grin, as Skye and Jemma watch them with clutched-bosoms like it’s a damned harlequin romance; as May leans against the wall with her arms folded across her chest but a gleam of approval in her gaze.

“Sergeant Barnes?” Tony’s voice cuts in with far too much self-satisfied amusement for any good to come of it. “Alive and kissing—wait, no, kicking. I meant alive and kicking,” Tony smirks as he enunciates pointedly. “Obviously.”

And Bucky’s eyes are still glimmering like mad, and Steve can’t help but lean in and make an honest man out of Tony Stark for the foreseeable future as he presses close, lips curving upward as he looks at the man in his arms and thinks: _dear god_.

 _Somehow, he’s mine_.

**Author's Note:**

> Please note the archive warnings that _aren't_ used, here, if you find yourself concerned :)
> 
> Also: [tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com), if you want.


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